Introduction

The presupposition of this chapter is that the contemporary political landscape is composed of large, discontinuous areas that are difficult to see by design. In particular, the bureaucratic order and military and surveillance powers of the modern state have necessitated a transformation of dissenting politics from the sphere of public symbolism to subaltern counterpublics that value less visible and untraceable forms of action. The hard work of theorizing today is a matter of recognizing these new forms of political life, and this sort of theoretical vision requires mobility embodied by both the theorist and the citizen. Most often this work takes the form of conceiving democratic theory as flexible enough to go “outside the conventional public sphere, outside traditional ‘male spaces,’ partly by a radical, pluralizing rethinking of those spaces and what they can be for citizens” (Saward 2006: 407). But I am more concerned here, following a Wittgensteinian, street-level view, to see not how new spaces expand citizenship, but the way citizens create new spaces; and not how democratic theories conceive citizens, but how citizens use democracy and seams of invisibility to engage in political action.